I blogged at the start of the month on Martin Jacques’ observation on the extent to which China was now more significant than the US in the politics of Asia in all aspects other than military. Since then, I’ve noticed a post on the IFTF blog which argued that as China and India become the dominant trading partners across Africa and Asia that we are reverting to the trading patterns seen before European colonisation.

It’s worth noting an article that the Guardian’s economics editor Larry Elliott filed earlier this week from Davos. Although he acknowledges that it is possible to construct an argument which is sanguine about the current prospects for the world economy, it is not the most likely outcome. One of the reasons, he suggests, is that the movers and shakers are still living in a “dream world” propped up by “at least five big fantasies” about the global economic system.

One of the things you learn working as a journalist is that most news is predictable – a point satirised by Michael Frayn in his outstanding novel The Tin Men in the 1960s. But sometimes headlines do still surprise you. One such was the news that British car exports had reached record levels last year.